Waging a war against recruitment at Albuquerque’s public high schools

By Kate Trainor

In Albuquerque’s high schools, students are more likely to sign up for military service than join the student senate. The armed forces are as popular as any school sport and, on many campuses, military recruiters and the JROTC are a more prominent presence than college or career scouts.

Freecycle proves one man's ugly pink chair is another man's treasure

By Jessica Cassyle Carr

In many respects, ours is a throwaway society. We use untold disposable widgets: Razors, pens, lighters, napkins. Restaurants and households toss out foodstuffs like there's an unlimited supply. Cars break and are indifferently junked. Functional buildings are torn down and replaced with new ones. Lasting objects, underneath it all, seem to be an affront to this ever-revolving door, relentlessly enticing its consumers with new and better goods. As a result, landscapes are marred with dumps that teem with the discarded, both legitimate refuse and salvageable goods.

Bad Science, Bad News—I hope by the time this is published, it is but one more voice in a symphony of angry letters and editorials directed at the top story on the front page of Friday's Albuquerque Journal. The story, "Lean to the Left? It May Be Mommy's Fault," succeeds on no level. It's a bad headline on a bad piece of reporting about some bad science.

The story behind the mayor's tax cuts

By Jerry Ortiz y Pino

Let’s run through this one more time. Maybe then it’ll make some sense to me, ’cuz I gotta say, so far this brouhaha over cutting the city’s share of gross receipts taxes seems like mayoral foolishness and not much else.

Dateline: Germany—Police are trying to decide whether or not to charge a wheelchair-bound man with drunk driving after he was found weaving down the road near the northeastern city of Schwerin. The unnamed 31-year-old was found to be 10 times over the legal alcohol limit for drivers. “He was right in the middle of the road,” a police spokesperson told reporters. “The officers couldn’t quite believe it when they saw the results of the breath test. That’s a life-threatening figure.” The intoxicated man told police he had been out drinking with a friend and was just trying to get back to his home some two miles away. Police said that because the man was technically traveling as a pedestrian, it is unlikely that he will be charged with a driving offense. “It’s not like we can impound his wheelchair,” the spokesperson said. “But he is facing some sort of punishment.”

[RE: The Real Side, “The Man Who Got Iglesias,” May 24-30] Scarantino argues that charges of voter fraud against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now were “bogus." Of course, anyone who remembers that case knows that, in fact, there were documented cases of ineligible voters registered by ACORN personnel. The excuse for not filing fraud charges was that the law had been “interpreted" so that it isn't really “fraud" unless you can prove that the primary intent was to corrupt the election process, rather than simply making more money (ACORN workers are paid based on how many people they sign up). Proving “state of mind" in such cases is next to impossible. Thus, the people on the bottom are “safe" because they have a monetary motive, and those on top, who set up the process with precisely those incentives, are sufficiently distant from the actual dirty work that they're safe as well ... and Scarantino complains about Karl Rove?